Paradise Summary

Paradise touches on a wide variety of themes as it explores the experiences, thoughts, and memories of its central character, Simon. Marriage, sexual and economic power, midlife crisis, generation gaps, male inadequacy, male fantasy, the element of fear in urban life, the responsibility of the artist, feminism, and religious ideas of guilt and grace all appear as concerns in the novel. Often, however, these themes remain undeveloped since Barthelme's style presents them as disjointed elements in an often collagelike structure.

The characters whose disjointed lives express these themes are also not so much developed as presented to the reader in a collection of sometimes unconnected moments, fragments of conversation, and loose memories.

Paradise Short Guide

Donald Barthelme Biographies (2)

Donald Barthelme has achieved his present eminence as one of the leading popular innovators in American fiction through the pages of the New Yorker magazine, where he began publishing in 1963. But, al...
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Two years after Donald Barthelme's death, his friend Robert Coover observed that his name had achieved a new currency as an adjective: the term "Barthelmesque," Coover wrote, refers not only to a styl...
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